Allegorical Nonsense
"If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense," Alice says to her sister as she lazes under a tree. Then she notices a frantic white rabbit making a break for a hole and crawls in after him, falling down a huge pit into her fantastical wonderland. She drinks a potion and becomes small enough to fit through an animated keyhole, she attends a manic "unbirthday" party, is serenaded by a chorus of flowers, plays croquet with a tyrannical queen, and wanders around in the woods confused by signs pointing everywhere and nowhere. A white rabbit; the tea-obsessed Mad Hatter; a silly Dodo bird; a smoking caterpillar; vulture-umbrellas; dog-brooms; rocking horseflies; bread-and-butterflies; and a philosophizing, grinning Cheshire cat are just a few of the surreal characters she encounters on her mental journey.

Carroll's fable touches on childhood innocence breaking into a broader world of understanding where anything is possible. Carroll presents his Alice with many paths, many confusing directions, and one goal — to follow the rabbit. At one point she asks herself tearfully why she's following him at all. These larger life questions are certainly made more palatable through the imagination of a child. Encountering singing flowers and tea parties along life's windy path certainly helps.

Disney borrows from both Carroll's Adventures of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass to add in as many wily elements as possible to this full-length feature, which makes it less surprising that these elements don't fit seamlessly together. Tweedledum and Tweedledee's story of "The Walrus and the Carpenter" feels very out of place. The songs are catchy, with that operatic quality on the slower numbers that characterized many early Disney releases like "April Showers" from Bambi. Even though this Alice (Kathryn Beaumont) doesn't have a polished lead voice like Little Mermaid's Ariel or Beauty and the Beast's Belle, her songs have a much-needed childlike simplicity and softness that's endearing. The other voice actors — especially Ed Wynn as the Mad Hatter and Sterling Holloway as the Cheshire Cat — add significantly to the whimsy and charm with their spirited performances.

Read-along, Sing-along Fun for the Kiddies
Time for a sing-along! It's almost like walking past bright, faux-cheery, sweater-vested employees and into the heart of the Disney Store where a big screen churns out all your Disney favorites in sing-along form. Except now anyone over five can sing along without embarrassment. Harmonize with "The Unbirthday Song" and "All in the Golden Afternoon." Or don't. No one will know. Another kiddie-centered feature is the "DVD Storybook." You can choose to have the story narrated to you or read the story yourself as you click through the pages. The former option will unfortunately be the more popular one because it has music. Besides music, a nice feature for the self-directed option would have been interactive help on the harder words and a surprise scene at the end. At least the 16 trivia questions engage children's comprehension skills, but there is no incentive here either for reluctant learners except a simple "you are correct."

The highlight for the older viewers is a little piece of history called "Operation Wonderland." This featurette is culled from a 1951 news story about the making of Alice at the Disney studios. A reporter greets Walt riding a large toy train through the lot and tours through the story department where we see how the animation is coming along, and the sound stage where we meet the voices behind Alice, the March Hare, and the Mad Hatter. Walt Disney himself places the drawings on a background and shoots film in the camera department. This 10-minute tour, though brief, is a highly informative overview of the old animation process.

This Gold Classic Collection edition is presented in its original 1.33:1 aspect ratio (full-screen) in a beautiful, color-saturated digital transfer. It's offered in English with 5.0 Surround Sound and in Spanish with 2.0 mono. The theatrical trailer is included — as are numerous annoying mini-trailers when you first pop the DVD in. You can thank Disney's marketing machine for those.